Wu Liuyi's suffering did not last long. A few minutes later, when new recruits began arriving one after another, he was already drenched in sweat, lying there with a blissful look on his face as he watched the sky brighten.
"Whew... hah... ptooey!"
Gao Cheng ran over, gasping hard and hawking up phlegm in one fluid sequence. Then he looked at Wu Liuyi lying on the ground, Wang Yan sitting cross-legged beside him, and the veteran soldier keeping time.
"How was it? What times did they get?"
"Wang Yan got 19 minutes 32 seconds, Wu Liuyi got 19 minutes 43 seconds. Both broke twenty minutes. They're not human—they're absolute beasts."
"Damn..." Gao Cheng's eyes widened. "And carrying over thirty kilos, too. Those results would have no equal in the entire army. Good, very good!"
"This kid screwed with me. He'd speed up, then slow down, like he was walking a dog." Wu Liuyi patted Wang Yan beside him. "If he'd run at a steady pace, he definitely could've gone faster. Carrying over thirty kilos seemed like nothing to him. If he hadn't led me along, I couldn't have broken twenty minutes even if it killed me."
Wu Liuyi was telling the truth. Under the proper assessment standards, twenty-six minutes was already the mark to beat, and that was with only fifteen kilos of weight. Even when junior officers held their soldiers to high standards, being within one or two minutes of that was generally considered passing.
Forget loaded cross-country running—even in a normal five-kilometer run, an amateur runner getting under twenty minutes was already pretty good. And this was cross-country, with a load, and a thirty-kilo load at that.
The soldiers trained every day, toughening their bodies and honing their combat skills, but they were still human. With that kind